Please accept my apology in how long it has taken me to write this letter to you.

There are many reasons for me to express my deepest thanks to you for your decades of public service. As a former high school English teacher from Philly, your lifelong commitment to create a just, equitable, and inclusive society for all of our children has deeply resonated with me.

But today, I want to particularly thank you for how gracious you’ve been in casting aside your personal feelings about the outcome to the election to unite our country. Despite the fact you’re now leading by more than two million popular votes, you’ve put aside your huge disappointment to unite the country.

I have nightmares about how our country might be torn apart if there is no peaceful transition of power at the end of elections. While many of your opponents have painted you as a villain with unbridled ambition, I want you to know, I recognize how big your sacrifice is to unite our great nation.

Thank you for all your work and I hope to join you and millions of other citizens to continue to work towards a just, equitable, and inclusive future for all our kiddos.

Want to say your thanks to Hillary??
Please consider writing a letter from your heart to Hillary and email it to us at hillaryletters@gmail.com.
We’ll be posting letters here: http://www.letterstohillary.org/

Please help us spread the word by sharing this post with your friends and networks.

If you’ve not attended EduCon before, you’re missing out. If you’ve been here before, I don’t need to explain the magic of Educon to you.

I invite you and your colleagues to EduCon, a conference hosted by my former school, Science Leadership Academy, in Philadelphia. It would be lovely to see you here and a treat to spread the conversations among the wonderful folks that you work with.

This year’s conference takes place the weekend of January 27-29, 2017 at our school. It’s not a typical conference: there are no vendors present, and the breakout sessions are conversations, not presentations. Every year I am reminded of the incredible communities I am privileged to be a part of — both the SLA community and the EduCon communtiy — and feel so proud of the work we do in our conversations about education. I’ve written about our conference many times on my blog; this reflection is one of my favorites.

I hope you can be a part of our community at this year’s EduCon. Registration is available on our website, and proposals for conversations are being accepted through November 1. Your voice would be a valuable addition to the mix.

I’d love to hear your reflections or tips for new attendees if you’d like to share in the comments. Thanks!

In a few weeks, I will be leaving the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to join the incredible team at Minecraft Education. I’m grateful to the Foundation for introducing me to so many inspirational educators and ideas, and I’ll always be a champion of the Foundation’s commitment to equity, optimism, and students.

In my new role at Minecraft, I will be joining a team that helps students unlock their own potential for deep learning. My students at Science Leadership Academy first helped me to learn about the potential for using gameplay in storytelling, problem-solving, and creative thinking. I am bringing that powerful experience with me, and I am excited about the ways in which Minecraft’s creative and collaborative platform can put students at the center of learning.

While candidates and media concentrate on issues that matter to voters in this election season, teachers and students in our nation’s schools will be concentrating on issues that matter to the next generation of voters. How can they have a voice? How can we support the mission of schools to engage youth as productive and active citizens?

Letters to the Next President 2.0 (L2P 2.0) is an initiative that empowers young people (13–18) to voice their opinions and ideas on the issues that matter to them in the 2016 presidential election. The focal point of the program is a massive, open online publishing platform where any educator or youth mentor give their students a safe place to voice their opinions about key election issues that they believe the next president whomever he or she may be—needs to address. The site also offers a dynamic repository of resources, ideas, how-to’s, and other helpful information for educators to make the L2P 2.0 project engaging and powerful for their students.

L2P 2.0 is being built by teachers for teachers and students, but you can help us reach

as many youth as possible so that their voices can be heard. Sign up for resources and opportunities.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I often rely on the wisdom of the Kid President to give me enough courage, strength, and motivation to keep doing good work in the world. For me, work of Kid President embodies the values we should all try to lift up in our lives, values such as kindness, generosity, optimism, and inclusivity.

Unfortunately, this is not the current political or civic climate of our country.

If you’re fed up with the current election cycle, or just are looking for more ways to make writing real and relevant for your kiddos, look no further than the Letters to the Next President 2.0 project from National Writing Project. See below the image for more info about this opportunity:

For many writing project educators, Letters to the Next President 2.0 is an exciting opportunity to support youth voice and civic participation around issues that matter to them. Here are some materials to support this work at your site this coming summer and into the fall.

The L2P 2.0 Promotional Toolkit is a resource created to support you in getting the word out about this project. Find here language for posts, tweets as well as images you can use via blogs/newsletters as well as on social media.

Coming up soon! NWP Radio on Thursday May 26 at 4pm PT/7pm ET is about Design Thinking for Letters to the Next President 2.0 with teachers and students from across the country including the Hudson Valley Writing Project, Cal State Writing Project in LA, UNC Charlotte Writing Project and more!

If you haven’t already done so, please sign up at letters2president.org. Signing up here will keep you in the loop about the youth publishing site when it launches in August. And, until then, you will receive updates on resources and opportunities that support educators in thinking about how to make use of this opportunity in classrooms and in out of school learning spaces.

One last note: Let us know if you will be working with youth to write letters, either text or multimedia, this summer. We are looking for a range of examples to pre-populate the youth publishing site (letters would be selected for diversity from among a set and would need to be ready for publication by early July in order to prepare for the public launch). Email us at nextprez@nwp.org to let us know.

Hope your week is off to a great start. One thing I need to figure out is picking a day of the week to send out the newsletter, have been vacillating between Fridays and Mondays. I have been reflective about what it means to show up fully in your work? And what that could possibly mean for students who come into our classrooms? How do we work to create a welcoming environment in our schools and classrooms? If you have thoughts on this or community building you do in your classroom, I’d love to hear back from you.

Obama at Rutgers — “Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science: These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy. … That might seem obvious. … We traditionally have valued those things, but if you’re listening to today’s political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from.”

My aim is to share some of my work in progress. As an admirer of Austin Kleon, I try to adhere to his mantra: Show Your Work as much as possible.

With each newsletters, you can expect a general update from on things I am thinking about and working on, links that caught my eye, and something that made me laugh.

If you’ve been wondering what I have been up to at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, you can check out some of the work that I’ve contributed to here: http://teacher2teacher.education/. As I have done before through efforts like #engchat, I am working with a team to connect more teachers to one and another in order to improve practice.

I hope this newsletter finds you well and serves as an easy way for us to keep in touch and share each other’s work. I’d love to hear what you’re working on, thinking about, etc.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote at F8 – confession, I haven’t watched the whole thing but the first few moments about open connectivity and how it can make the world better are powerful (take it with grain of salt.)

A New Map for America – interesting argument about how the way we organize ourselves in states might be an outdated system and unable to meet demands of our changing economy, society